C. S. Lewis

Today is the 50th anniversary of the death of C. S. Lewis (wikipedia). Once an atheist, who became a well known Christian author who’s works crossed boundaries into the secular world, particularly with the Chronicles of Narnia series.

Here is my favourite C. S. Lewis quote:

“I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”

His books were a great impression on me as an early Christian, especially these prophetic words from the 1940s which warn us of things being said far too often in our churches today.